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Conducting ethical internal research

Conducting ethical internal research

As User Researchers, we champion user-centred approaches, and our work can be internal or external facing. As part of being user-centred, we have a duty to protect our participants’ data, as well as their wellbeing and safety; this applies whether they are members of the public or other civil servants and staff. In this blog, you’ll read about the steps you yourself can take to make sure you’re researching with internal participants in an ethical way.

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GOV.UK Notify: a better way for user researchers to send messages

Posted by: , Posted on: - Categories: Tips and techniques, User research
A screenshot of a message drafted in GOV.UK Notify called "Notify user satisfaction survey"

GOV.UK Notify is a platform for public servants who need to send emails, text messages and letters. In this blog, Chris Marshall explains how user researchers can benefit from using GOV.UK Notify to send messages about their research.

Conducting remote research with people with access needs

Posted by: , Posted on: - Categories: Accessibility, Assisted digital, Digital inclusion, Remote research, Tips and techniques, User research
Woman works on her laptop

One of the challenges we face with remote research is making it accessible for our users. We recently ran a remote cross-government user research workshop, and Ariana shares our top 10 lessons learned from this.

How we developed a simple user research library at Ofsted

Posted by: , Posted on: - Categories: Tips and techniques, User research infrastructure
A screenshot of the User research library welcome page. Welcome to the Ofsted user research library This site contains all the user research conducted at Ofsted from 2017 onwards. Please ensure you update the Catalogue with links to where your files are stored on this site. Please do not delete, move or rename any existing files/folders. This site enables secure sharing of Ofsted documents with external organisations. Therefore, please ensure materials you store are here and adequately anonymised. If you have any questions, please contact user.research@ofsted.gov.uk

Many departments across government are exploring questions of how they capture, organise, and share their research learning, with some departments recruiting digital librarians to build repositories. Here, Salma Patel shares a smaller scale solution she developed to meet the immediate needs in Ofsted.

User Research and COVID-19: crowdsourcing tools and tips for remote research

Posted by: and , Posted on: - Categories: COVID-19, Remote research, Tips and techniques, User research methods
A laptop screen showing desk research into the cost of users repeating themselves

This blog reports on a GDS user research workshop to build a toolbox of remote working tools we can use while COVID-19 is with us. Please do feel free to let us know any other tools you use.

Building your user research career: Trialling a “workshop in a box”

Posted by: , Posted on: - Categories: Training and development
A poster from Services week 2020 that says 'Build your user research career workshop'

One issue the User Research community is exploring is how to help user researchers manage their careers. In this blog, Marium Ladha, User Researcher at DfT outlines a career development workshop she recently ran for user researchers, and shares some resources you can use.

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Government Service Design Manual: resources for user researchers

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